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Peter Godfrey-Smith, the author of “Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science,” has been thinking about how people can avoid the misunderstanding embedded in the phrase, “It’s only a theory.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story It’s helpful, he argues, to think about theories as being like maps.“To say something is a map is not to say it’s a hunch,” said Dr. Godfrey-Smith, a professor at the City University of New York and the University of Sydney. “It’s an attempt to represent some territory.”A theory, likewise, represents a territory of science. Instead of rivers, hills, and towns, the pieces of the territory are facts.“To call something a map is not to say anything about how good it is,” Dr. Godfrey-Smith added. “There are fantastically good maps where there’s not a shred of doubt about their accuracy. And there are maps that are speculative.”To judge a map’s quality, we can see how well it guides us through its territory. In a similar way, scientists test out new theories against evidence. Just as many maps have proven to be unreliable, many theories have been cast aside.But other theories have become the foundation of modern science, such as the theory of evolution, the general theory of relativity, the theory of plate tectonics, the theory that the sun is at the center of the solar system, and the germ theory of disease.“To the best of our ability, we’ve tested them, and they’ve held up,” said Dr. Miller. “And that’s why we’ve held on to these things.”

“It is morally problematic, because more people are thinking of pets as people … They consider them part of their family, they think of them as their best friend, they wouldn’t sell them for a million dollars,” says Dr Hal Herzog, a professor of psychology at Western Carolina University and one of the founders of the budding field of anthrozoology, which examines human-animal relations. At the same time, research is revealing that the emotional lives of animals, even relatively “simple” animals such as goldfish, are far more complex and rich than we once thought (“dogs are people, too”, according to a 2013 New York Times comment piece by the neuroscientist Gregory Berns). “The logical consequence is that the more we attribute them with these characteristics, the less right we have to control every single aspect of their lives,” says Herzog.

To what extent can we and should we aspire to create machines that can outthink us? For example, Netflix has an algorithm that can predict what movies you will like based on the ones you've already seen and rated. Suppose a dating site were to develop a similar algorithm—maybe even a more sophisticated one—and predict with some accuracy which partner would be the best match for you. Whose advice would you trust more? The advice of the smart dating app or the advice of your parents or your friends?

The question, it seems to me, is should we use new genetic technologies only to cure disease and repair injury, or also to make ourselves better-than-well. Should we aspire to become the masters of our natures to protect our children and improve their life prospects?AdvertisementAdvertisement This goes back to the role of accident. Is the unpredictability of the child an important precondition of the unconditional love of parents for children? My worry is that if we go beyond health, we run the risk of turning parenthood into an extension of the consumer society.

A series of studies suggests that, while a product’s ethics may influence purchasing decisions, many shoppers choose simply not to know whether something was ethically made. That includes shoppers who care about social responsibility. And shoppers who ignore ethical matters can even develop a negative opinion about people who do express ethical concerns—which makes them even less likely to pay attention to ethical issues in the future.

“You feel badly that you were not ethical when someone else was,” Rebecca Reczek, a professor of marketing at Ohio State University and one of the study’s authors, told NPR about the results. “It’s a threat to your sense of self, to your identity. So to recover from that, you put the other person down.”

International supply chains, she points out, are notoriously opaque, and the free market doesn’t have any good way to deal with the way this system stifles information. It might be best, she says, if these matters were regulated before the products even reached consumers, taking ethical dilemmas out of the shopping equation. Of the unethical choice, like a polluting car or a shirt made with exploited labor, she suggests: “Maybe we just shouldn’t have it available.”

One of the more benign aspects of Chinese medicine is acupuncture, a practice deemed superstitious in China in the 17th century until Mao Zedong reemployed it for political purposes in the fifties. Two decades later it infiltrated the American imagination. A myth was reborn. As Jeneen Interlandi writes, research results have been murky at best—one 2013 report of over 3,000 studies showed acupuncture to be no more effective than placebos.